This study focuses on teaching Chinese for Special Purposes (CSP) and explores how terminology used in Chinese commercial contracts can be taught using a contrastive terminology analysis. Firstly, we outline the contextual differences that exist between commercial contracts drafted in Chinese and those drafted in English. Secondly, we describe the…

This study revisits the Carpenter and Krutka survey of how and why educators use Twitter, through exploring one of Twitter's oldest education hashtags: #Edchat. From October 1, 2017, to June 5, 2018, more than 1.2 million unique #Edchat tweets were collected from approximately 200,000 different tweeters. Machine coding was used to answer…

The potential of social media to give insight into the dynamic evolution of public conversations, and into their reactive and constitutive role in political activities, has to date been underdeveloped. While topic modeling can give static insight into the structure of a conversation, and keyword volume tracking can show how engagement with a…

Recently, both sociology of science and policy research have shown increased interest in scientific uncertainty. To contribute to these debates and create an empirical measure of scientific uncertainty, we inductively devised two systems of classification or ontologies to describe scientific uncertainty in a large corpus of food safety risk…

This study aims to explore cross-language intensification in affirmative sentences by examining the translation of standard amplifiers, words that scale upward towards an assumed norm to emphasize a quality of any entities, from Thai into English. The data comprises 602 parallel concordance lines with 17 intensifying patterns, which were drawn…

Data-driven learning (DDL; Johns, 1991), involving students' hands-on use of corpora for self-guided language learning, is a methodology now increasingly used in many tertiary contexts to enhance the teaching of disciplinary postgraduate thesis writing. However, there are still few studies tracking students' actual engagement with corpora for DDL.…

This article uses the clitic left dislocation (CLLD) construction in L2 Spanish to investigate whether generative SLA has valuable insights to contribute to language teaching. Although CLLD is a structure that is commonly used by native speakers, as reported anecdotally and in at least one corpus, we found that native-Spanish and native-English…

The purpose of this study is to examine the public opinion on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Twitter. Using Twitter Application Program Interface (API), we collected the tweets containing the hashtags #CommonCore and #CCSS for 12 months from 2014 to 2015. A Common Core corpus was created by compiling all the collected 660,051 tweets.…

Prior research has shown that, under certain conditions, Human-Agent (H-A) alignment exists to a stronger degree than that found in Human-Human (H-H) communication. In an H-H Second Language (L2) setting, evidence of alignment has been linked to learning and teaching strategy. We present a novel analysis of H-A and H-H L2 learner dialogues using…

This study is one of the pioneers in investigating and analyzing the orthographical conventions/norms of the outer circle Asian Englishes using one of the largest databases of English corpus, the Global Web-based English (GloWbE). This study extends the analysis of the current orthographical norms of the new varieties to their colonial parents.…

This study examines the extent to which instructions to self-explain vs. "other"-explain a text lead readers to produce different forms of explanations. Natural language processing was used to examine the content and characteristics of the explanations produced as a function of instruction condition. Undergraduate students (n = 146)…

It has long been debated whether the Open-Book-Open-Web exam was useful and efficient as the traditional closed book exams. Some scholars and practitioners have doubted the efficiency and the possibility of cheating in the OBOW as it is not directly monitored. This paper tends to investigate the effectiveness of OBOW exams by comparing them with…

Although program evaluations using rigorous quasi-experimental or experimental designs can inform decisions about whether to continue or terminate a given program, they often have limited ability to reveal the mechanisms by which complex interventions achieve their effects. To illuminate these mechanisms, this paper analyzes novel text data from…

Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary…